Ziphone

Zibri, creator of ZiPhone just announced on his blog that ZiPhone.org is for sale. Since the birth of his child last month, Zibri is obviously busy with his family, which I totally understand.

For those of you who are not familiar with the ZiPhone, it was the first jailbreaking software developed to make the jailbreaking process a child play. I mean, ZiPhone was and still remains my favorite jailbreaking tool. Hands down! ZiPhone worked under firmware 1.x but wasn’t updated for firmware 2.x earlier this year.

So why was ZiPhone my favorite jailbreaking tool? For one, it was the only software that never crashed on me. But most importantly, it was so easy to use that a caveman could have done it… You simply had to download Ziphone, install, plug your iPhone, click jailbreak and wait a few seconds. *Sigh*, I miss those days…

So now the domain name is for sale. If you’re a little bit into Internet Marketing, that might be interesting for you. The website has a PR6 and countless backlinks. I would love to buy this domain name but I don’t think I have enough in the bank right now to afford it. If you’re interested, you’ll have to spend $50 on the front end, just to be able to bid on the domain name. The highest bidder will then get it.

Below is a copy of what Zibri wrote on his blog:

It was an incredible ride, guys, and I’m sincerely grateful to everybody who made this happen. As some of you may know, from the 7th of November 2008 I’m a father. All my efforts are now focused on my family then, later, I’ll start some other project maybe related with the iPhone, maybe not. So, from now the ziphone.org domain (Pagerank 6 on Google) is FOR SALE. Here’s how the sale works: Go to the donation page, donate $50 and write your buy offer in the donation description free text field. At the end of the sale the highest bid will get the domain. Direct emails will not count as bids. If by the end of the sale the maximum bid will not meet my minumum requirement, all $50 donations will be refunded and the sale won’t happen. Sale result and winning bidder will appear on this site. The sale will end on 20st January 2009. If the winner won’t pay the bid by the 10th of February 2009, the 2nd higher bidder will be the winner. Namaste, Zibri Hint: There is a banner on the right side of this site. That banner links to a site which evaluate other sites. Bids lower than 1/3 of the “Net Worth” will be rejected. The daily ads revenue on that site is pretty accurate. And so is the daily pageview (average in the last months). Happy bidding.

If you guys are interested, hop over to ZiPhone.org and make your bid.

As for me, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Zibri for his involvement in the iPhone community. You did an amazing job and always stood for yourself, even under criticism from the other guys (psst, that’s the Dev Team). Good luck to you and your family!

On a post on his blog today, Zibri, the creator of ZiPhone, said he was not rushing to release a new version of the iPhone that would allow you to jailbreak and maybe unlock your iPhone or iPod Touch. Zibri didn’t say he would release a new version of ZiPhone for sure.

Ziphone is my all time favorite application for jailbreaking the iPhone. I’ve always found it super easy to use. Even though the Pwning tools such as WinPwn and QuickPwn are stupid simple to use, my heart still goes to ZiPhone.

From Zibri’s blog: At the moment I’m testing and tweaking what could be the next ZiPhone version.

As it happened the first time, I’m not rushing and as it already happened in february I’m not even sure I will release it. Zibri also said he found a pretty big bug in the iPhone and he’s not sure what he wants to do with it: I just found something that can crash any iphone/ipod and exploitability is being investigated. This vulnerability anyhow affects all models and firmwares. I can’t tell you more about this.

Since this bug is VERY serious I have yet to decide what to do with it. If Apple is interested I think they know my email address. If they are not… well they will know sooner or later. Looks like someone is looking for a job at Apple? Haha. Keep rockin’ Zibster!

Zibri posted this weekend that he is currently working on a new version of ZiPhone. I have always been a big fan of ZiPhone as it offers a one-click jailbreak/unlock for the iPhone. I really respect the DevTeam and cmw for QuickPwn and WinPwn, but I have to admit my heart goes to ZiPhone…

Here is what Zibri says: I’m testing at the moment a very preliminary version of the next ZiPhone.. Let me tell you it’s impressive. A very few testers screamed when they saw how simple is this. I can’t tell you more for now.. It’s really to early. This makes me think that ZiPhone is gonna be much easier to use than QuickPwn and WinPwn, which are already dead simple…

PlanetBeing, a member of the DevTeam, wrote a very interesting post about the similarities and differences between QuickPwn and Ziphone. If you’re not an iPhone geek, don’t even bother reading this…

Here is what PlanetBeing took into account (as you can see, there are more differences than similarities):

Similarities:

jailbreak payload medium

Differences: Technique

ZiPhone uses, as the root filesystem device, a pseudo-device that provides a window to an arbitrary section of memory. This memory is not allocated or otherwise reserved by the operating system and hence will be used by other random processes in other random ways and will become more and more corrupted with every CPU clock cycle. The only safe way to use this is to mlock all memory used by the jailbreak binary as soon as possible, and then use data previously uploaded to flash. Anything else will cause either the jailbreak binary to crash at random moments or cause random data to be written to flash. I am not sure why Zibri elected not to implement ZiPhone in a safer fashion.

QuickPwn uses the same mechanism that Apple uses to send its update ramdisk. This memory is both allocated and reserved. It will not crash at random moments, or give you repeating BSD root errors. This is the way the XNU kernel is designed to use ramdisks.

Longevity

ZiPhone hinges on a BUG in iBoot that was quickly fixed by Apple.

QuickPwn uses an iBoot FEATURE that Apple cannot remove without rewriting their own software and undergoing lengthy QA. Even if Apple did change the architecture, it would be straight-forward to simply mimic what they do and adapt to it. The reason QuickPwn can do this is because it relies on a hardware exploit to bootstrap into this phase. Apple cannot fix this problem without changing the manufactured hardware.

Elegance

ZiPhone modifies an existing Apple ramdisk and ships it as a complete set.

QuickPwn contains all-original code and features a very tiny bootstrapper that allows it to use libraries and code that’s already on the iPhone.

Not only does ZiPhone’s distribution of Apple’s binaries violate copyright laws, it also takes up a large portion of room on the ramdisk that could be used for the payload. Keeping its existing algorithm, ZiPhone would never have been able to install Cydia, for example. The maximum feasible ramdisk size is 32 MB; Cydia takes 13 and Apple’s library take up a significant amount. With some work, Zibri could possibly make it just under the 32 MB limit, but with the large number of files in Cydia, and the large size of the corruptible area of memory, corruption would be inevitable. Click here to read the full post.